"During slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose to do," Carson said. "And what if the abolitionists had said, ‘You know, I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong. But you guys do whatever you want to do.’ Where would we be?”

Carson said he remains staunchly opposed to Roe V. Wade, which he would 'love' to see overturned, though he said he would consider keeping abortions legal for the "extraordinarily rare situation" in which a woman's life depends on terminating a pregnancy.